akwaeke emeziKonto zweryfikowane

On another note, if you’re going to chat about me and be transphobic, you’ve already disqualified literally everything you had to say. It’s no longer valid because it’s underpinned by bigotry. Sorry, I don’t make the rules

I will say that ever since I started working on Freshwater in 2014, I knew that the most hostile recipients of this work would be Igbo cishet men who consider themselves the gatekeepers of our belief systems.

I knew that to move spiritfirst the way I do would be invalidated because I’m queer and trans and “Westernized” and tattooed and whatever whatever, deviant full stop. I’m not who or what they want representing our culture.

Freshwater has been ignored by certain circles of our people because to engage with it would mean acknowledging that it is real and what that means for contemporary Igbo culture. It’s much easier to call it lies.

There’s nothing more I wanted for this book than to open up more space for us to talk about our indigenous realities, but I really underestimated how some wouldn’t receive it precisely because it came through me, not someone cishet and ‘respectable’. What a waste.

What a goddamn shame, as a matter of fact. You see the people who claim to hold our culture attempting to gatekeep based on standards that were literally put in place by colonialism and the whole thing is a loop of a higi begging to make sense.

And you can’t even take it seriously because their anger has contaminated everything—that bile they feel that someone as deviant as me got to where I am by loudly repping our ontology while writing for trans/queer Africans (continental and diasporic, aka all Black people).

It’s just an extension of the whole thing of trans/queer Africans aren’t African, that we don’t belong, that we have no claims or rights to our own homes. To now take it to the sacred, to the spiritual, they see it as blasphemy, us coming for what is theirs and untouchable.